After Receiving Modest Success with a Poem I Appreciate Poetry’s Irrelevance

This must be the way the shoe repair man felt

looking through his dusty window

the Wal-mart going up, women who hurried by

in brand new vinyl boots.

So I read this poem

in a library or shoestring café

an art gallery owned by a soft-hearted heiress

in this room

where everybody knows who Henri Cole is

everybody knows at least one Yeats poem by heart

everybody in this room owns

several scarves

nobody drives a car

with all the windows working

everybody drives

with backseats feathered

in scraps of paper

scrawled lines about flocks of birds

in silver skies

And outside

a whole raging river of progress

job descriptions, births, graduations,

technology rising in great geometric waves

and I am a twig

caught in an eddy

spinning one moment

then still

hidden in brambles.

But, yea, I am not alone.

Here is a goatherd

here a carburetor mechanic

a cobbler, two small farmers,

look a blacksmith there in the back

his leather chaps, his heavy hands

coal smudges on his nose

and there a gentleman in a fedora

his wife in gloves

other poets of course, limping to their tables

a trio of milk maids giggling

into calico aprons

and you

my sweet seamstress

with wet and longing eyes lowered

over your basket of mending.

Lisa Ortiz